"Once upon a time.." Storytelling and Innovation with Rory's Story Cubes

Having just read Chuck Frey's post Enhance your creativity through storytelling and his review of A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink, I thought it time to share how I developed Rory's Story Cubes and use them as an aid to innovation. Using a technique developed by Win Wenger know as Beachhead, I developed Rory's Story Cubes in an attempt to create a game that explored the use of pattern recognition. If I get a chance, I'll post the audio file of this session. I quickly prototyped a Rubik's Cube version which proved incredibly popular.

After unsuccessfully getting the International distributor of the Rubik's Cube to pick up on the idea, I developed a dice version with the help of Kate Jones and Kadon Games, as there was no copyright on their usage. Here you can see the sample version as they come of the line in China. So how do I use them? I ask the person to frame a question that they want to gain some insight into. This may be "How do I innovate our service?" or "How do we break free of clients we aren't happy with?", etc. They then roll the dice, and tell me a story that begins with "Once upon a time..." that somehow links all the images on the the dice into one coherent story. What inevitably happens is that the story that unfolds acts as a metaphor for the issue that the person is facing. By asking how does this or that event, character, location provide some insight into your question, my clients usually experience a breakthrough in their understanding of the issue, leading to greater insight and answers they had never previously considered. Rory's Story Cubes will be available by the end of May to purchase from The Creativity Hub You can try out this technique now, by checking out my previous post Rory's Story Cubes - The Counterbalance to Sudoku